Link Building 101: Competitor Analysis

Link building is something anyone can accomplish. There’s no great secret, just hard work, creativity, and determination to get links that matter.

When you’re looking for some practical link building opportunities that will help you find and acquire quick, yet quality, links, there are five “quick wins” you should explore at the beginning of a link building campaign:

Download CSVs of competitor’s backlink portfolios (‘Inbound Links’ will give you a list of all the pages linking, ‘Linking Domains’ will give you only the domains).

Note: if you’re unfamiliar with your own (or client’s) backlink portfolio, you may wish to include their backlink portfolio in this process for reference.

Using OSE don’t forget to filter to the whole domain:

Open the CSVs and combine (copy and paste) all the data into a single Excel sheet.

Filter down to clean URLs, keeping the originals intact.

Move Column J (target URL) to Column P (to be the last column)

Delete Column J (the now empty column)

Duplicate the URL and Target URL columns on either side

Remove http:// and www. from both column A and column P – select the column, click control+H (find and replace shortcut), type in what you want to find (http:// and www.) and replace them with nothing (by leaving the second line blank).

You might want to rename column A and P at this point – call them bare URL and bare target URL, or whatever you so desire (in the SEER article they were called ‘clean’).

Remove duplicates

Make sure it’s only for column A (bare URL) and P (bare target URL)

Notice the check mark on “My data has headers”. This is important to keep your data from being jumbled up. Anytime you’re removing duplicates make sure this box is checked.

This will give you a complete list of stripped URLs next to the full URL linking (along with the rest of the important information provided by OSE) and a list of full target URLs next to a complete list of stripped target URLs.

Note: you’ll still likely have a lot of duplicate URLs in column A (the linking URLs) at this point. This is because there’s multiple links on the same page going to different landing pages – which is potentially important information (shows a competitor acquired multiple links per page).

If you’d like to delete these multiple link pages/URLs to reduce data noise, highlight column A, and run ‘Delete Duplicates’ again – making sure to have the ‘My data has headers’ box is checked:

Now, you’ll be down to unique URLs (pages, not domains if you’ve used Inbound Links) linking to competitors. If you’re looking for only referring domains, you should start back at step 1 and download a CSV of referring domains, as opposed to all links.

At this point, you’re still dealing with a lot of data, so you’ll want to filter it further. I recommend filtering by domain authority to see the most authoritative links first.

This will make your list ordered from highest domain authority to lowest – pretty useful information. Keep in mind however that the domain authority is thrown off by any subdomains hosted on a popular site – example.wordpress.com, example.blogspot.com, etc.

So, don’t take the domain authority as absolute – you’ll need to verify.

There’s also a few other filters you can use to find interesting data:

Page Authority (PA)

Anchor Text

Number of domains linking (shows best ranking pages – don’t get stuck on home pages)

Take time and play around with the data. Look through the top DA’s (manually excluding anything artificially inflated), then PA’s, check out top performing pages via number of domains linking, and even play around with filtering the anchor text.

This should be the fun part – the analysis. You’ve filtered the data down to a semi-digestible level, and should start taking advantage to find insights and understand your competitor’s links.

Remember, any links your competitor has should be considered fair game for yourself. Once you’ve determined quality links from domains you haven’t secured, look into the link and pursue it appropriately.

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More Insights

If you’re looking for an even better (and more advanced) deep data insights you can move all this information into pivot tables. Simply select all rows, click over to the insert tab, and select ‘Pivot Table’:

Once here you have the option to choose which fields you’d like to further examine:

Playing with this data should reveal potential insights, although we’re getting a bit beyond Link Building 101.

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